Toying with his Tamagotchi, Steve fretted silently. He was thinking about the same thing he had been thinking about for months now – the Millennium bug. Would it mean the end of civilisation as we know it? Would governments collapse? He had read enough to know that planes would fall out of the sky – that was a given – but what other, less easy to predict effects might it have?

He rocked back and forth on his in-line skates. What if The Matrix was true, and all of this was just a simulation? When the Y2K bug hit, would he wake up in a pod full of jelly in a futuristic power station? It was as likely as anything else. Resolving to shake off this worrying line of thought, he turned and set off for home, his hungry digital pet beeping plaintively from his pocket as, in the sky above, the sound of jet engines suddenly stopped.